I was recently intrigued to learn that only half of the respondents to a survey said that they used disk encryption. Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows have been increasingly using encryption by default. On the other hand, while most Linux installers I’ve encountered include the option to encrypt, it is not selected by default.
Whether it’s a test bench, beater laptop, NAS, or daily driver, I encrypt for peace of mind. Whatever I end up doing on my machines, I can be pretty confident my data won’t end up in the wrong hands if the drive is stolen or lost and can be erased by simply overwriting the LUKS header. Recovering from an unbootable state or copying files out from an encrypted boot drive only takes a couple more commands compared to an unencrypted setup.
But that’s just me and I’m curious to hear what other reasons to encrypt or not to encrypt are out there.
I do not as I do not have any sensitive data and what data is sensitive are the digital documents which are securely encrypted by default via id card and its passwords.
If I start having something worth protecting I will turn on fedoras encryption. But until then anyone who manages to steal my 100 eur thinkpad and guess its password is welcome to try out linux and see if they like it I guess.
They don’t need to guess the password. If you don’t have full disk encryption I can just run another is in live mode and mount your drive and read everything. And even change the password to your fedora, by changing the hash in shadow file
oh no, if they changed the password and I got it back somehow, I could finally have an excuse to try out mint.